Report From The Battle Of Ideas: "Can we trust the evidence? The IPCC – A case study"

I attended the Battle of Ideas event yesterday at the Royal College of Art in London, “Can we trust the evidence? The IPCC – a case study“. The answer is unequivocally NO! [BTW Fora TV – The world is not thinking, was there so a video will follow] It was interesting to note that there were about a dozen empty seats – certainly not your usual ‘wall to wall greens’, indicating perhaps that the IPCC and global warming, has gone off the boil and is not such a hot ticket any more.

And, I might add that, in a sense – from the greens perspective – this event was very much an opportunity for the them to publicly re-group, to wash their dirty laundry, to acknowledge and confess the past sins of the IPCC and to say: “Okay the IPCC is guilty of overt cheating and made mistakes, but essentially the science is sound and we just want to put all of that ‘Climategate’ affair behind us and move on.”

In a nutshell, this was the purpose of Fred Pearce (New Scientist), who argued this case, [and is obviously attempting to maintain his credibility and readership], and I must admit I do find him an able journalist, who sadly just hasn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that he has become a cheerleader for high-risk speculative capitalism i.e. carbon trading.

He is still under the delusion that this debate is about the science and the environment, which of course we know it is not – it’s about carbon taxes, sucking the wealth out of Britain; it’s about creating a new carbon/climate change banking system [lots more of our dosh going in to the pockets of the bankers]; essentially this debate is about power, greed, and the conflict, within capitalism between as I mentioned high-risk speculative capitalism v investment capitalism, and if the carbon traders win we will undoubtedly be further robbed of our democratic rights and freedoms, to say nothing of the imposition of devastating regressive carbon taxes on our poorest citizens.

Fay – indeed – “the science is sound” is an empty statement for people grasping at the last straws. “Climate change” has been an issue at the interface between science and policy for many, many years (surely since 1992, or perhaps even before).

Hence if Climategate has destroyed that interface, there is little comfort into proclaiming that “the science is sound”.